While I don’t agree with everything in Steven Johnson’s semi-recent book, Everything Bad is Good for You, it does present an interesting lens through which to reexamine pop culture. In a theory he calls “The Sleeper Curve,” Johnson states that pop culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less, as is conventionally assumed. Johnson bolsters his theory with examples from video games, television, and film. Though he doesn’t mention it, where hip-hop is concerned, I couldn’t agree with him more. Continue reading “Not Bad Meaning Bad, but Bad Meaning Good”
Understanding Mediation
Though Gutenberg’s printing press represents what Marshall McLuhan referred to as the first assembly line — one of repeatable, linear text — and is what made large-volume printed information a personal, portable phenomenon, the advent of the telegraph brought forth the initial singularity in the evolution of information technology. The telegraph enabled the bifurcation of communication and transportation, and information became a commodity. As Neil Postman put it, “…telegraphy created the idea of context-free information — that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.” Continue reading “Understanding Mediation”
Workbooks
I am finding more and more of my thinking gets worked out in notebooks and journals. Recently having access to a scanner, I thought I’d share some pages. Continue reading “Workbooks”
A Million Little Realities
So, the latest Oprah Book Club phenom has come under fire as a fraud. The Smoking Gun has called out many factual discrepancies in James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Now, I haven’t read the book or the accusations — nor do I plan to — so, if you’re looking for commentary on that, you’ll have to look elsewhere. The whole to do has gotten me thinking about language and reality, so I’m just using the controversy as an occasion to talk about words. Continue reading “A Million Little Realities”
My Mother Was a Computer by N. Katherine Hayles and Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling
There’s been a lot of chatter, books written, and hand-waving about the merging of humans and machines ever since the computer reared its digital head. From artificial intelligence and humanoid robots to microchip implants and uploading consciousness, the melding of biology and technology has been prophesized far and wide.
Humans are indeed merging with machines, but don’t believe the hype: It’s not happening in the way those old science fiction books would have you think. Continue reading “My Mother Was a Computer by N. Katherine Hayles and Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling”
DIG BMX Magazine Interview with Roy Christopher
Brian Tunney conducted this interview with me for the impecable DIG BMX Magazine. Here’s an excerpt: “The impetus behind frontwheeldrive.com remains to collect and spread the word about cultural artifacts and the people that make them. I try not to limit the subject matter anymore because I view the mind as an ecology. For any ecology to grow and flourish, it needs diversity. New stuff comes not from the well-defined fields, but from the interaction between them. Allowing theorists, artists, BMXers, musicians, skateboarders, etc. to rub shoulders, frontwheeldrive.com attempts to cross-pollinate areas of interest so that new ideas can grow.”
DIG BMX Magazine
The Online World of Roy Christopher
[by Brian Tunney]
Roy Christopher champions a concept he calls ‘Design Science.’ The phrase roughly means the undertaking of the design of one’s own life, and he applies this concept to every facet of his life, including his many undertakings in both print zine making and websites. The basic principle behind Design Science is change. Its stipulation is simple; if you’re not happy with something, change it. And Roy’s made that a universal application within his life, which includes his presence on the Internet. To his credit, he maintains more than a few websites (including frontwheeldrive.com, HEADTUBE, royc.org, 21C, and WHAT ARMY), and also, on occasion, prints a zine called “Headtube,” which he calls “The thinking man’s [sic] BMX magazine.” Though you won’t find the latest tricks, industry gossip or new BMX parts on any of Roy’s sites, you will find a BMX presence. The difference here is that BMX and riding a BMX bike is not portrayed within the microcosm of the BMX world. Roy reaches out to the remainder of the world he comes into contact with, and the result, as he phrases it, “Allows theorists, artists, BMXers, musicians, skateboarders, etc. to rub shoulders… cross-pollinating areas of interest so that new ideas can grow.” Amid pursuing a graduate’s degree, teaching undergrad classes, riding and writing, Roy took the time to answer some questions about his many online endeavors. For more information on all the Design Science of Roy Christopher, visit one of his many websites. And don’t forget that change can be a good thing….
Brian Tunney: How long have you been involved in making zines and or websites for, both BMX and non-related?
Roy Christopher: I started making zines in the summer of 1986. Just after Freestylin’ Magazine did their first big zine report, I went to my friend Matt Bailie’s house and said, “We could do this.” So, in ninth grade, we started writing, shooting photos, and compiling our first issues. The zine was called “The Unexplained” because Matt had always wanted to use that as a name for something (The question mark logo that went along with that zine has since evolved into the WHAT ARMY project). Ten years later, my friend Mark Wieman started messing around with HTML, and I saw the web as another level in zine-making. Though I was still doing print zines, I learned HTML, bought some domain names, and starting building websites.
BT: When did your writing focus begin to drift outside of BMX?
RC: It kinda drifted at first in the early 1990s. The AFA had shut down, the NBL stopped their regional series in the Southeast (I grew up in the South), the magazines and teams disappeared, and it looked like BMX was dead. I was still riding and doing shows, but the death of the contests really put a damper on the energy that BMX had in my creative output. During those dark days of BMX, my writing turned almost completely to music. I finished my undergraduate degree (in Social Science) and moved from Alabama to Seattle. It was there that my zine-making lead to my writing music reviews and features for magazines, but it was there also that I found people to ride with again. So, BMX became a major focus in my zines again by 1995.
BT: What is the impetus behind frontwheeldrive.com, and additionally, your zine HEADTUBE?
RC: “frontwheeldrive” was the name of the zine I was doing when I started making websites, so the first domain name I bought was ‘frontwheeldrive.com’. It took a while for it to find focus, but its current incarnation is a reflection of another personal shift in interests.
Around 1998, I stumbled upon a book by James Gleick called Chaos. It’s a good overview of the disparate areas of research that eventually lead to the field of chaos theory. It cracked my head wide open. While reading this book, I moved from Seattle to San Francisco to join SLAP Skateboard Magazine as their music editor, but soon left to go back to school. I’d suddenly found that I wanted to do so much more than write about music.
frontwheeldrive.com started to reflect this shift in earnest in early 1999, and it’s been evolving ever since. We (myself and a few friends that help me out, mainly Tom Georgoulias and Brandon Pierce, but many of our interview subjects have gone on to become contributors) write reviews of just about anything that we find interesting and do interviews with people that we think are doing interesting things. Admittedly, it started with a focus on the fringes of science, but we’ve since (over the past six years) opened it up to include BMX, skateboarding, music, art, literature, and film along with the science. Like I said, just about anything we find interesting.
So, the impetus behind frontwheeldrive.com remains to collect and spread the word about cultural artifacts and the people that make them. I try not to limit the subject matter anymore because I view the mind as an ecology. For any ecology to grow and flourish, it needs diversity. New stuff comes not from the well-defined fields, but from the interaction between them. Allowing theorists, artists, BMXers, musicians, skateboarders, etc. to rub shoulders, frontwheeldrive.com attempts to cross-pollinate areas of interest so that new ideas can grow.
The zine HEADTUBE was my attempt to fill what I see as a void in BMX media. Back when I started doing zines, Freestylin’ Magazine really felt like it covered the culture of BMX — not just the riders, the products, the contests, and a few music reviews, but the culture surrounding the people who ride twenty-inch bikes. Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jones truly created something that doesn’t exist anymore. HEADTUBE was an attempt to bring some semblance of that back. I’m only speaking of it in the past tense because I haven’t gotten around to doing a second issue. I want to do it regularly, but graduate school and teaching have been keeping my other projects limited somewhat.
As much as possible, I try not to limit myself though. A few years ago, Ron Wilkerson told me, “If you don’t have it, you didn’t want it bad enough.” I took that to heart, and I try to pursue any and everything I want to accomplish — and I encourage everyone else to do the same. There’s no reason you can’t have everything you want.
BT: You write for more than a few websites aside from your own projects, and you’re also in the process of writing your first book. Can you tell us more about how you began contributing written pieces to websites, what sites you currently contribute to, and more about the book?
RC: The contributions to other websites are a result of a combination of the things I’ve done with frontwheeldrive.com, and my music journalism days. I still write about music on a regular basis for SLAP, and I wrote some pieces for Disinformation when that was something one could do (They’ve since switched up their format), and I think most of the other websites to which I contributed have changed hands or disappeared. I’m open though.
The book is called Actual Size: Culture on the Edge of the Underground, the Media, and the Mind. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that, in the broadest sense, it’s a quasi-theoretical exploration of how culture is created. I’m studying a lot of my favorite underground cultural phenomena with several of my favorite theories. It’s currently making its way around the book-publishing machine somewhere, so think happy thoughts.
I’ve also been helping Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) edit an essay collection called Sound Unbound: Music, Multimedia, and Contemporary Sound Art — An Anthology of Writings on Contemporary Culture, which will be out this fall on The MIT Press; throwing around project ideas with my friend Doug Stanhope; and finishing up my master’s thesis, among other things.
BT: Is BMX more of an escape now from everything else you do?
RC: I tend to recoil from the idea of escapism. I immediately think of the character in the novel Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins: In a discussion about “I’d Rather Be” bumper stickers, he said that if there “was something he’d rather be doing, he’d damn well be doing it!”
So, I don’t think of riding as an escape. BMX has given me so much over the years that I like to just act like I’m still a part of it. I was never sponsored beyond the bike shop level (though I do get unofficial flow from Ronnie Bonner at UGP, Dave Young at BLK/HRT, and Wiggins at Black Box), I only placed in an AFA contest once (2nd place, 14-15 Novice Flatland, 1985), the only time I’ve been in a BMX magazine (before now) was to get dissed by McGoo (Ride BMX, October/November, 1995), a Slayer feature I wrote (Ride BMX, June, 96), a few things I wrote for Faction BMX (one piece on Seattle ripper Steve Machuga and one, coincidentally, on zine-making — with a contribution from Lew), and a few music articles for the short-lived Tread, but I still get the same feeling from riding my bike as I did twenty-five years ago (I raced oh-so-briefly in 1979). As long as it feels that way, and my body holds out, I’ll be riding little kids’ bikes — as an escape or otherwise.
BT: You describe media as the intersection between culture and technology. How does this theory relate to the idea of making a BMX website, zine or video?
RC: Well, in the broadest sense, one of my main research interests is the influence of technology on culture. The study of media — and even that in my mind is quite broad — somewhat narrows the research to where the results of this collision play out. I’m focused on the domains of various youth cultures, so BMX media is where bikes, digital cameras, video cameras, writing, riding, music, and the like converge and capture the culture in time. When you watch a video or see a magazine from a certain era (think late-80s Plywood Hoods’ Dorkin’ videos, mid-90s Props, or an issue of Go or Freestylin’), you’re seeing a snapshot of BMX culture at that time. With that in mind, no one else is going to capture what you think is interesting, intriguing, or important, so that’s why I advocate making independent media — about BMX or whatever else you’re into.
BT: Finally, if you had to recommend some websites, both BMX and non-BMX, can you make some suggestions and why you’ve chosen them?
RC: Non-BMX-wise, I usually visit the sites of my friends to see what they’re doing. Folks like Steven Shaviro, Doug Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Erik Davis, dälek, Milemarker, Doug Stanhope, and Howard Bloom. For BMX stuff, I usually go to Nev’s Backlash BMX site for news, and Jared’s site, Brian’s site, or company sites (like Terrible One or Underground Products) for the inside scoop. I keep a rotating list of links on my site. I tend to frequent sites that combine personality and insight with interesting subject matter.
[DIG BMX Magazine #46, May 2005]
[photo by Claire Putney.]
The Thing That I Call “RoyC.”
Advertising space being sold on our foreheads notwithstanding, we still live in a multimedia world where attention is the currency in trade. A couple of years ago, Doug Rushkoff sat down with John Brockman for a discussion about media, branding, choices, and what the “self” means among them. Seemingly mundane but paramount to our musing here, the question comes up as to what kind of shoes represent The Thing That Doug Calls “Doug.” Continue reading “The Thing That I Call “RoyC.””
Man Auctions Ad Space on His Forehead
I wish that were the first science fiction joke of 2005 (a lá Cory Doctorow’s Billy Bailey), but it’s not. It’s real.
My initial reaction to this type of thing (i.e., advertising showing up on personal vehicles, weather reports, football fields, etc.) is disgust, but once I think through it and recover, I’ve had hints of a different residual reaction lately. Let me see if I can be brief. This continued and exponentially increasing encroachment of corporations on personal space is just one of those things we can’t change. As Seattle’s The Stranger put it in an article a couple of years ago (in an issue called “Yes Logo” in response to Naomi Klein’s book, No Logo): corporate culture is American culture. There’s no escape. So, what do we do?
This is the part I’ve been working on: Aside from the extremes — constant frustration at one end and total resignation at the other — what can we do? There has to be a higher ground, a meta-level to this issue. If pushed far enough, you will realize that everything is fucked. So, then what? Well, then you look out for you and yours and don’t sweat the issue. Hedonism becomes the optimal path. But then one runs the risk of apathy and indifference to circumstances that ultimately do affect you and yours. As I said, I’m still working on it.
Friend and colleague Richard Metzger has a healthy attitude toward this kind of stuff and has helped lower my blood pressure quite a bit. It’s a qualified hedonism: We don’t want to be marginalized by Corporate America. We want to become Corporate America.
Other than Richard, two exemplars and their thoughts also come immediately to mind: artist Shepard Fairey and comedian Doug Stanhope.
Shepard does work for corporate clients to fund his Obey Giant projects. “The money that I make from doing corporate work allows me the freedom to do other things that I want to do, such as, travel around to different cities to put my stuff up and to make more posters, stickers and stencils, all the time…” Shepard explains. “The other thing is that I’d like to make corporate or mainstream companies not suck as hard, by doing some artwork for them that doesn’t insult the consumer. I look at it like ‘wouldn’t it be great if you could turn on the radio and hear great songs even on the top 40’s station?’ I know this philosophy won’t appeal to the elitist who thinks it’s cool to be marginalized and special and into the hip things that no one else knows about, but I’m a populist, and I think that attitude is very immature.”
Doug said something that sticks with me as well. He said, “Selling out includes not doing something you’d enjoy, on whatever level, just because of what someone else might think.” The issue of corporate involvement, branding, marketing, advertising, etc. is more complicated than I once thought of it. It’s a very complex, organic memespace in which we all exchange currency — whether we want to or not.
To wit, one might adapt Stewart Brand‘s dictum, “Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick.” to read, “Marketing marches on, over you or through you, take your pick” (Andrew Fisher certainly did). Manichean dichotomy or not, it depicts the unfortunate reality of the situation, and to quote it up a bit more, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice” (Rush, “Free Will”).
I am sanguine that there’s a way to philosophically feel okay about this shit without selling your forehead, “selling out,” and without pulling a Kaczynski.
Steven Johnson: No Bitmaps for These Territories
When a friend of mine loaned me Steven Johnson’s first book, I had no idea what he was getting me into. On the surface, Interface Culture (Harper San Francisco, 1997) looks like most other books on the subject of computer interfaces, but how many times must I be warned not to judged books by their looks before I start to believe.
Johnson’s books each tackle a different topic than the one before, but they all wander wide enough for you to see the color outside of the lines. Where Interface Culture seemed to be about interfaces, it was about, well, interfaces — but interfaces like I’d never thought of them before, in places I’d never seen them before. Emergence (Scribner, 2001) was about emergent phenomena and network culture, but again, in ways that I hadn’t seen discussed before. Johnson writes about the signs of the times, but no one else sees what they signify quite like he does.
His latest book, Mind Wide Open (Scribner, 2004), is an autoethnographic romp through the neurobiology of his brain. It’s not quite like reading a Charlie Kaufman script, but it’s close. He also co-founded FEED online magazine, and writes for Wired, Discover, Slate, Salon, and many others.
I’ve returned to Interface Culture many times since that first read, and in turn, I asked Johnson to return with me [Special thanks to Jonathan Field for additional input].
Roy Christopher: I want to go back in time a bit to your first book, Interface Culture. Its title betrays the broad scope of the book, but in the meantime, the interface has expanded in our culture: Everything from media, to branding, to communication is, in effect, an interface. Did you see this expansion when writing this book?
Steven Johnson: In a (slightly self-congratulatory) word: yes. There were a few things I think I ended up being wrong about, and more than a few that I failed to anticipate, but the general argument has held up very well over the eight years that have passed since I wrote it. The argument, simply put, was this: in a society where information is proliferating at an exponential rate, and where information is valued above all else, the tools we have to manage and filter that information — our interfaces — become the most important symbolic or “sense-making” form in the culture. It’s not exaggerating things to say that Google is the defining mode of self-representation for our society, and Google is, in the end, just an interface to the web.
RC: What are your thoughts on our political system as an interface? Everything in this country has evolved so much over the past century, except government. How well do you think it works in today’s world so far as serving the public interest and public good?
SJ: I tend to be an optimist about a lot of things, but the state of the government is not something that puts me in a half-full kind of mood. We’re clearly in a transition phase right now, one that might well last another ten years, if not longer: a small and vocal (and well-publicized) part of the electorate has realized the power of information revolution, and they’re demanding that politics be revolutionized accordingly. (Just today, one of the heads of Moveon.org announced that they had “bought” the Democratic Party in 2004 and it was time for the old guard to hand over the keys.) But a lot of us still think about politics the old-fashioned way: as a remote force over our lives that we can’t control in any real way. I said after Dean imploded that his campaign was a classic study in the clash of two overlapping paradigms: the internet had transformed the way people raise money and mobilize supporters and that had led to Dean’s spectacular rise in late 2003, but the decision that people made about who to vote for was still governed by the tradition of seeing someone on TV (or, if you were really lucky, seeing them in a town hall meeting in person.) And that created an imbalance — because all the early indicators revolved around money and activist passion, which created an artificial sense of Dean’s inevitability. But the “actual voters” didn’t really dig him.
RC: As long as we’re talking about interfaces, what about branding? What about the homogenization of the landscape where big-box retailers are concerned? This is a personal pet peeve, but I like to see different things in different places when I travel. I hate to see the same four stores, or the same coffee shop in every town. Is there any company you think is respecting regional culture even as they move in and set up shop?
SJ: I’m sympathetic to what you’re saying, but I think there’s a risk of sentimentality here as well. I mean, Starbucks is everywhere, which means by a certain standard the world has gotten more homogeneous. On the other hand, the world is now filled with far more places where I can order a triple-shot iced latté with good espresso. Ten years ago the number of places serving a wide range of coffees was pretty small, outside the ten biggest cities and maybe a dozen college towns. But thanks to Starbucks, even airports and shopping malls now have a huge palette of coffee options to choose from. Same goes for Barnes & Noble. Their outlets regularly carry Interface Culture in stores, despite the fact that it never came close to being a bestseller. But you would have been very hard pressed to find a book like that in a nonmetropolitan/academic bookstore ten years ago. (And then there’s the whole Amazon phenomenon, where everyone with a web connection now has access to the most obscure titles in print.)
So for the people outside the urban centers, I think the chains have largely been a force for more diversity, not less. The question is whether the chains are killing off the diversity in the cities themselves. I don’t think anyone has done a convincing study of this yet. My hunch would be it’s pretty much a draw: Soho is filled with J. Crew and The Gap now, but five blocks over in NoLiTa there are more small designers in one-room shops than there ever were in Soho. There are fewer indie bookstores now, but frankly, I don’t need indie bookstores with Amazon. And there are like a thousand Starbucks in NYC, but all the classic small coffee shops I know of are still thriving.
RC: In Emergence, you uproot the free-content-with-advertising model of mass media and propose an opt-in, information-exchange model. You envision a world of media with less ads, but rather a more open exchange of information between companies and consumers. As someone who cringes at ads filling every available space, I like the idea. Do you think there’s a way to get past the privacy issues, or protect privacy, and still implement such a model?
SJ: Amazon sends me email announcements when there’s a new release that it thinks I might be interested in, given my past purchasing history. I’d estimate off the top of my head that they’re on target about thirty percent of the time (often it’s notifying me of something I’ve already purchased, though not from them.) That means that two-thirds of the time they’re completely off base in anticipating my interests, but still I welcome those emails. I mean, what’s the batting average of all the other advertising in my life — all the billboards and radio plugs and subway banners and random TV spots, not to mention the spam? It’s a fraction of a fraction of a percent, if you add it all up. So when someone shows up and says, “thirty percent of the time, I’m going to point out something you really might want to buy,” I say: “Great, keep it coming.”
As for the privacy issues, I don’t know. I worry about health and financial records — and personal information about my family — getting into the wrong hands. But I don’t care about someone tracking the DVDs that I buy, as long they give me a one-click method of shutting down their recommendations if they’re not working for me.
RC: What’s the new book-in-progress all about?
SJ: It’s a pure work of persuasion, arguing that popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today’s television or games — much less the internet — than you did a few decades ago. It will definitely be the most controversial of my books, but I think it’s also going to be a fun read. It’s called Everything Bad Is Good For You, and it’ll be out in the U.S. in early May.
The Laws of Cool by Alan Liu
Even with as many texts as have come out exploring and explicating our so-called information age, there has yet to be a more exhaustive account of just what the hell has happened than Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool (University of Chicago Press). Nevermind the misleading title. This isn’t another exposé on “cool hunting” and finding out what the kids are into. This lengthy tome is about how most of us came to be knowledge workers in the factories of information.
To call this book “exhaustive” is an understatement. I can’t stress the reaches of Liu’s research or the sprawling implications of his book enough – and reading it is quite the lengthy process. Every time one thinks that Liu has found his bounds, the next chapter opens another door on which one wouldn’t have even thought of knocking. Yet, it’s a cohesive work, written with unwavering wit and erudition.
Exploring the Foucauldian climate of the corporate control culture, set off by IT and the mainframe, Liu shows how managers came to be “seduced by the system” (as Ellen Ullman put it in her book Close to the Machine). They used the abilities of their information systems to keep tabs on their workers – even where there had previously been no problems. His use of temperature-related tropes (e.g., “hot,” “cold,” “warm,” and especially “cool”) is confusing at first, due to the previous uses of such terms (i.e., as slang or as in McLuhan’s ubiquitous probes). These temperatures eventually come together to illuminate the weather of the twenty first century workaday, from the stifling of hot emotions by the cold machine to the warmth of friends and family and the cool of today’s assimilated, yet über-hip “knowledge workers” (“We work here, but we’re cool,” quoth Liu).
Taken whole, The Laws of Cool is a high relief, topographical map of the workscape of the early twenty first century. Couple this with Ken Wark‘s A Hacker Manifesto and you have a crash course in post-Marxist labor studies.